Juniors Poppy Anema, left, and Viola Holman and sophomore Erik Ubel study the progress of their experiment as Minnehaha Academy students study the effects of gravity on the application of polymers at the St. Paul home of one of their mentors, Tom Holman, on Thursday, Jan 3, 2013. The results will be sent to the International Space Station, where the experiment will be run again in zero gravity to see if there are any differences in the results. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

Students at Minnehaha Academy say their science experiment will culminate in two months of watching paint dry -- in space.

A group of teens at the Minneapolis Christian school have dibs on a tiny but coveted piece of real state on the International Space Station. The academy is among a handful of schools nationally that scored a chance to conduct an experiment there.

The run-up to takeoff has been anything but dull: Students had to build an intricate setup complete with a motor, heater, fan, thermometer, camera and light -- and fit it in a container the size of a pencil holder. They've brainstormed with scientists from as far away as China and a few of their own parents turned volunteer consultants.

Junior Viola Holman loads a "micro lab" with a sample of string about to be coated with a polymer solution. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

"We're having a blast doing this," said junior Viola Holman. "In the end, we get to send something into space. How often do you get to say this?"

When Minnehaha Academy President Donna Harris took over in 2009, she and other school leaders looked for ways to beef up the school's science offerings. Harris came from San Jose's Valley Christian High School, which recently teamed with a Texas company that lines up research opportunities on the space station.

In 2010, Valley students shipped off basil and marigold seeds in a special plant-growing container. Since then, several other West Coast schools have joined in. Harris worked her Valley Christian connections to sign up Minnehaha.

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When the school put out a call for interested students in the spring, about 40 stepped up, said Harris: "That was our first indication this program would really take off."

The 16 students selected tackled the project in the fall.

They researched the space station experiments California students had conducted, and in a glue malfunction in one early project they got an idea. They set out to test how polymers -- the chemical compounds used in bottles, credit cards and, yes, adhesives -- dry in the space station's microgravity.

Sam Terfa, one of two Minnehaha science teachers overseeing the group, said the students' choice caught him by surprise: "It's complicated, and it's really technical."

But students were calling the shots, and they were excited. When they let their imaginations roam, they pictured astronauts using more reliable adhesives to patch up space equipment thanks to their research.

A parent adviser to the group works at Valspar, the Minneapolis-based paint and coatings maker. The students visited the company headquarters for a crash course on polymers.

They donned lab coats and gazed at polymers coalescing behind glass while their hosts scribbled chemical formulas on it in dry-erase marker. They brainstormed with an international group of employees in the company cafeteria.

"They were scientists with Ph.Ds, but they were interested in the same questions we were," said junior Poppy Anema. "We learned so much about what it's like to be an adult and work in a lab."

Then, it was on to the design. Students needed a motor that would pull string out of a tube, coating it with the polymer. They needed a fan and heater to regulate the temperature. They needed a tiny camera to document the experiment. And all of it had to fit in a 2-by-2-by-4-inch container.

The group struggled to design a polymer tube that could expand with changing pressure on the way to the space station. They tested various designs in a vacuum chamber at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, helplessly watching polymer squirt out of tube after tube.

Junior Poppy Anema pulls out the polymer covered string before an experiment. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

It turned out duct tape works wonderfully to solve just such a problem.

There were more hurdles: The first motor students designed was not powerful enough to pull out the string. The first heater was too big to fit into the container.

Students came in before classes to work on the project and stayed in the school's lab for marathon problem-solving sessions on Friday evenings. They scrambled to finish it during winter break.

"These guys are doing things that are more sophisticated than some of what I did in graduate school as an engineer," said Tom Holman, Viola's dad and one of six volunteer advisers.

Later this week, Terfa will deliver the finished container to Valley Christian for NASA testing. The team then will have some time to tweak their design before the container departs for the space station March 7.

For the next two months, astronauts will send back data several times a week. When the container returns, students will compare how their polymer dried in space and on earth under a high-powered microscope.

Minnehaha Academy hopes to make the program an annual fixture of its high school curriculum -- an academic prize to inspire elementary and middle school students to step up their game in science classes.

"If we ever get to do this again," said Viola Holman, "we have so many more ideas we could try."